Connection

I've been thinking about how profound it is that we need each other. Now, some people will tell you that we don't really need each other - that relationships are an icing-on-the-cake kind of deal. "They're nice and we definitely have fuller lives if we have them, but they're not absolutely necessary for survival." Well, tell me how an infant would survive if it had no one to feed it when it cried.

And it's not just that we need each other to provide for our physical needs. I'm thinking that if you were left alone, you'd go crazy. We need other minds to "organize" our own. When an infant is not even a year old, it has done enough needing of others that it has begun to form an idea of how people respond to it - whether they are available and caring or not. That is what builds our view of ourselves and the world. How cool is that, that we are built that way - to seek each other out and connect? To see if there is someone out there to whom we matter?